Ro’s ship hung off Vachss Station, drifting in orbit around Vijaya, the Haxigoji homeworld. There was an awful fuss ongoing in the station, to do with a return visit from Rekka Chandri, the UNSA solo observer who had made first contact. That time, she had involved herself in the indigenous culture in a major way. Her return visit, as far as station staff were concerned, was controversial.

  The chattering local newsNet, lively even for a community of two hundred opinionated researchers, was full of analyses and contradictory predictions of the continuing intellectual rise - or possibly the imminent decline - of the intelligent native species, who had leaped from something like a Babylonian culture to medieval Renaissance in two short decades.

  ‘Interesting.’ Chalou was using an ear-plug, browsing audio. ‘Cannibalism. That’s a new one.’

  ‘What?’ Ro was immersed in feedback displays.

  ‘No matter. Just filling in the gaps that old public news items managed to gloss over.’

  The pod which Ro had abandoned and then retrieved from mu-space was now aboard the station, clamped inside a docking bay. Remote view showed station medics wheeling passenger couches from the open pod: taking them to med-wards where autodocs would revive them. Other passengers were staggering out: some by themselves, others leaning on station staff who had come to assist.

  ‘Breaks up the monotonous routine,’ murmured Ro.

  ‘Are they safely onboard?’ said Chalou.

  ‘No disasters yet. Looks like eight of them have gone to the med-wards, which matches the pod’s log. The same eight folk. Deep-drugged to hell.’

  ‘Hell is what they’ll raise when they wake up, amiral.’

  ‘What can I say, Claude? Merde alors. I should’ve taken a different geodesic.’

  Relativistic effects were even more pronounced in mu-space than in realspace. Ro’s chosen route had maximized time dilation, while minimizing the subjective duration. A gentler trajectory might have been easier on her passengers’ constitutions.

  After Ro’s firing on the Zajinet interloper over the Arizona base, UNSA controllers would already be backtracking, trying to calculate her movements since her previous official stop on Ganymede. The fact of her little side-voyages could not remain a secret. But so long as their purpose and destination remained hidden, Ro would weather the political storm.

  Zajinets tried to kill my son.

  The action had been too fast for Ro to determine whether it was Dirk or Kian aboard the ship that lay vulnerable on the runway. The Zajinet had been already setting up its strafing run when she inserted into real-space - almost too late: the thought caused her to tremble yet again - and there had been no time for communication.

  Perhaps they had both been aboard.

  ‘Are you all right, Ro? You fired on a ship.’

  ‘A Zajinet ship. And they were asking for it.’

  ‘Obviously. But why? Why would they attack a Pilot?’

  ‘I don’t know. I... No-one does.’

  Chalou nodded, and returned to browsing the station’s newsNet.

  It was perhaps an hour later when Chalou stopped humming softly to himself and turned to Ro. ‘Look ... This explorer, Mam’selle Chandri, who has caused so much trouble ... If you slip away quietly, there will be little fuss. She’s all they’re interested in.’

  Claude Chalou had a life - perhaps a twilit half-life - to return to in Oxford.

  ‘What if one of the passengers,’ said Ro, ‘fails to wake up?’

  ‘And what if station personnel demand to scan the holds? Standard procedure in an accident.’

  ‘They won’t find any malfunction.’

  ‘But they might find the matter compiler which McLean and I stole for you.’

  ‘Goddamn it, Claude. The passengers are my responsibility.’

  After a moment, Claude Chalou nodded. ‘C’est ça. C’est exact, bien sûr.’

  Something faint pinged in a display, was gone.

  What the hell was that?

  Ro could make no sense of it. Increasing the sensors’ gain, while simultaneously reviewing the log and attempting to analyse the signal, she searched for the source.

  ‘Electromagnetic flare.’ Chalou, though blind in realspace, had heard the tone and guessed what she was doing. ‘From the star.’

  ‘Yeah. Maybe.’

  She could find nothing to suggest otherwise.

  Then a message request shone, high priority from Station Control, and Ro waved a holo open. A lean, grey-haired woman looked at Ro, eyes widening in surprise.

  ‘Excuse me?’ said Ro. ‘I believe you called me.’

  ‘Yes ... But you look, um, different from the last time I saw you.’

  ‘I’m sorry? Have we met before?’

  ‘Actually, I held you in my arms. Half of me is surprised to see a strong, capable woman. The other half of me can’t get over how young you look.’

  Ro did not want to get into a discussion of time-dilating voyages through mu-space. She was going to be in enough trouble anyway, in that regard.

  ‘Were you a friend of my mother’s?’

  ‘Eventually. But I heard you, before I ever met Karyn.’ The woman’s face dimpled, and the smile removed decades from her features. ‘My name is Dorothy Verzhinski. Forty-three years ago - objective - I was based on Metronome Station, in the Delta Cephei system.’

  Ro wondered if the woman had undergone time-slowing travels of her own. Then she realized what Verzhinski was telling her.

  ‘You’re the one who picked up Mother’s distress beacon. Saved the both of us.’

  ‘If I hadn’t, someone else onboard would have heard you. Not just the auto-beacon, but the realtime audio channel: a baby wailing in deep space ... I’ll never forget that day.’

  ‘You’re the reason I was christened Dorothy.’

  ‘What? You don’t like the name?’

  ‘Let’s just say, there’s a reason why they call me Ro. But I am really pleased to meet you. I would love to come aboard, but only for a short—’

  Verzhinski shook her head, looked off to one side as if reading a display.

  ‘Perhaps some other time. I’m happy to report, all your passengers have woken up physically healthy.’

  ‘But psychologically?’

  ‘Well ... It might be better for you to leave before Senator Margolis reaches a comms terminal. I’ll say that I informed you of their waking up OK. That should cover both our backsides.’

  Ro grinned.

  ‘That’s another huge favour I owe you.’

  ‘Come back someday, and we’ll catch up. In the meantime ...’

  ‘Right.’ Ro concentrated, and her cabin displays rippled with system changes. ‘Thank you, Vachss Station. Ready to depart.’

  ‘Bon voyage, Pilot McNamara. Vachss Station out.’

  The comms-holo was gone.

  ‘Well, Claude. Looks like we’re going.’

  ‘No more strange signals?’

  ‘None that I can detect.’

  ‘Then, mon amiral, I would be grateful if I could see Labyrinth, just once before I die.’

  ‘In that case, mon ami... Labyrinth, here we come.’

  Ro could have flown directly along a minimum-duration geodesic. But this was Claude Chalou, a Pilot grown too old to be entrusted by UNSA with an expensive mu-space vessel. A man who deserved more than a blind existence on Terra.

  So Ro took him through crimson nebulae, across great tracts of golden light where no stars showed, and through a scintillating tree of fiery life whose rustles and whispers persisted in the ship’s cabin long after they had left the formation behind.

  ‘Ah, mon Dieu.’

  All the beauties of the mu-space vastness, she showed him.

  Then Ro turned her ship along a familiar trajectory, and a fractal universe slid past as they flew further and further from anything an unaltered human being would term reality.

  The ship slowed, in a region filled with amber light where spiky black stars massed. In realspace, it would have been the centre of a galaxy; in this continuum, one might dive into lower dimensions that opened up entirely different features: endless sheets of blank golden space, or - conversely - dense bracketed spongiform blackness. In a sense, a ship might remain in one spot yet explore an infinite variety of surroundings for ever.

  ‘Is it here?’

  ‘Just around the corner.’

  A twist, a ripple in the continuum which Ro navigated with skill.

  And then a vast construction was hanging before them: silver and black, smooth and jagged, its complex architecture both self-similar and varying, in a geometry far beyond humanity’s ability to grasp.

  ‘It’s ...’ Chalou’s voice trailed off.

  ‘Yes, it is, isn’t it?’

  There were endless halls, some open to golden space. There were arches and towers and turrets, pointed in every conceivable direction, worked at every conceivable scale from mountain-sized to microscopic ... as near as such terms had meaning in this place.

  Seven - no, eight - ships were visible, hanging before various portals. As Ro and Chalou watched, another ship slid from an opening surmounted with an impossible triangle - braided in perspectives that almost made sense - and arced away into the depths of mu-space.

  ‘Are Pilots living inside?’

  ‘Not permanently,’ said Ro. ‘Not yet. But there are those who spend more and more time here, not just helping with the construction, but resting and meditating among the Courts. It’s interesting ... Sometimes, you come across a square or a building that no-one claims responsibility for, as though it has come into existence by itself.’

  ‘Perhaps you have wrought more than you expected.’

  ‘Maybe.’ In the cabin, Ro patted his arm. ‘I think you’ve brought us the last matter compiler we’ll ever need. We’ve passed a critical point.’

  ‘You mean, the city’s growing by itself?’

  ‘It’s more than just a city.’

  She urged the ship forward through amber space.

  Closer. Chalou gasped at the detail.

  Amid the infinite complexity that was Labyrinth, a welcoming portal opened. An event membrane slid over Ro’s vessel as they passed inside.

  Into the only home a Pilot could require.

  Walking in the space known as Hilbert Hall, they met another Pilot and exchanged greetings. Like Chalou, Pilot Sandberg wore a visor clipped across his metal eye sockets; Labyrinth shone with energies that resonated in just the right way for the visors to decipher.

  ‘I wonder, Admiral’ - Sandberg’s words formed ghostly shimmerings in the air, faded - ‘whether you perceive this place in quite the way we do.’

  Ro looked around at the infinite planes which formed the Hall. Silver reflections slid across her obsidian eyes.

  ‘It’s like two people on Terra agreeing to call an apple red. Whether they’re experiencing the same thing, no-one can say.’

  Chalou turned in a circle on the spot.

  ‘Whatever we see, we can agree this place is magnificent. It is heaven.’

  ‘That it is, sir,’ said Sandberg. ‘Will you stay long?’

  ‘I think’ - Chalou sighed, turned to face Ro as golden ripples passed across his visor - ‘that Sam will be missing me. My dog,’ he explained to Sandberg.

  ‘Ah. Then I hope to see you again sometime, Pilot Chalou. Admiral.’

  Sandberg turned in a certain way, planes of light that had not been visible now rotated like doors, and he slipped into another level of Labyrinth and was gone from sight.

  ‘Such a marvellous place,’ said Chalou. ‘I would like ...’

  ‘When the time comes,’ Ro told him, ‘I’d be honoured to bring you back here to stay, for good.’

  Around them the hall’s majestic walls seemed to expand and contract as though in a sigh. The air, or what passed for it in this place, transmitted an intoxicating shiver.

  You are most welcome here.

  Chalou’s mouth dropped open.

  ‘My God, Admiral. It’s like the wind talking.’

  ‘What wind? Talking?’

  ‘Ah.’

  Beneath his visor, Chalou smiled.

  On the journey back to Terra, Chalou said little, and Ro respected his silence. But finally, in a pale stretch of amber space, they were nearing the insertion point.

  ‘Almost there.’

  ‘Thank you, Ro.’

  They shivered into realspace, into its blackness, with white stars as pinpoints in the void, and the fluffy white and blue globe of Terra that only Ro, now, could see.

  ‘Proximity alert. Proximity alert.’ Flaring holos.

  And the fast approach of three ships, headed straight for them.

  ‘Zajinets.’

  There was an infinite number of ways to re-enter mu-space from anywhere, but each point had its own quickest route: the least-action path. That was the one Ro took.

  ‘Hang on, Claude.’

  They screamed back into golden mu-space, with three attacking vessels on their tail.

  Violet lightning streaked past - some Zajinet weapon that operated in mu-space - and Ro took her ship through a shuddering series of turns. Golden space and black stars became a blur.

  ‘Shit.’

  The Zajinet ships, all three of them, were still behind them. Ro spun the ship through a helical manoeuvre, hesitated over a possible trajectory that would hook them back into realspace some thirty years after they had left it, then broke off and levelled out.

  ‘My niece Orla will take care of Sam.’ Chalou’s voice was grim. ‘Do what you have to do.’

  The ship shuddered as backlash from enemy weapons washed against the hull.

  ‘Damn it. They don’t even have to shoot us straight on.’ Ro’s own ship carried armaments, but the main weaponry was the graser-gatling arrays that worked only in realspace ... but in realspace, the Zajinets would catch her in seconds. This was where her ship came alive. ‘Come on ...’

  Turn, and turn.

  In his seat, Chalou arched back, fingers hooked like claws on the armrests; and Ro realized anew that Chalou was no longer a young man.

  ‘I will get us out of this,’ she said.

  Crimson turbulence gathered up ahead.

  Here we go.

  Ro accelerated. The Zajinets followed.

  Through a tunnel in the crimson nebula they flew. Then they burst out into a region of clear amber space. Far ahead hung one of those fractal shining trees that might be lifeforms whose distances spanned light-years measured by least-action geodesies.

  Everything is relative in mu-space.

  Ro flew hard, knowing that if she could reach the scintillating pattern in time, her three pursuers would never—

  ‘What’s that?’ Blood trickled from Chalou’s lip where he had bitten it.

  ‘I don’t— Oh, sweet Jesus Christ.’

  She banked the ship, desperately, knowing the pattern was unreachable now. There are thousands of them. An entire Zajinet fleet was looping towards them: too many vessels to count. Tricked me, the bastards.

  ‘Ah, Claude, I’m sorry. I ran just where they expected me to.’

  ‘It’s been my honour, Admiral.’

  ‘Mine also, Pilot.’

  Ro turned to join battle.

  ‘Weapons armed.’

  Knowing she could not win.

  The fleet was vast and unbeatable, but the trio who had chased her here ... Perhaps Ro could take at least one of them with her.

  Best I can do.

  In the seat beside her, Chalou gasped and wheezed, fighting for breath.

  It’s over for both of us.

  Ro bowed her head, deep into interface. Her vessel leaped forward and accelerated. Violet lightning flared so Ro - avoid! - slammed her ship to one side and Chalou groaned - again - and then something came out of the golden void moving faster than she would have thought possible.

  ##Hi, Mom. How’s this for a role reversal?##

  ‘Dirk?’

  The bronze ship blasted the centre Zajinet vessel before the alien pilot had registered the new ship’s sudden appearance. The other two Zajinet craft peeled off to either side.